Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (31 page)

It was in early December that the jury decided in favor of Mrs. Rhinelander, just as Micheaux was getting ready to launch
The House Behind the Cedars.
Firing on all pistons, he began to promote his newest movie—a similarly misbegotten romance, with the Negro woman's subtle skin shade permitting her to deceive (and dismay) a white gentleman suitor—as “An Amazing Parallel to the Famous Rhinelander Case!”

Micheaux dug into his shallow coffers for a road show–style premiere at the Royal Theater in Philadelphia. “At least two hundred specially invited guests of the owners and management” attended, entertained by a baritone soloist and organist. A “brief but educational statement” from Micheaux was read by leading man Andrew Bishop. It was a rather defensive proclamation, but perhaps understandably so, after five years of seeing his consistently controversial films mauled by censors and, on occasion, assailed by critics of his own race. Even so, as America's leading producer of race pictures, Micheaux saw his statement reprinted in black newspapers across the nation, right next to news bulletins about the Rhinelanders.

“I have been informed that my last production
Birthright
has occasioned much adverse criticism,” Micheaux stated. “Certain newspaper men have denounced me as a colored Judas, merely because they were either unaware of my aims or were not in sympathy with them. What, then, are my aims to which such critics have taken exception?

“I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life—to view the colored heart from close range. My results might have been narrow at times, due perhaps to certain limited situations which I endeavor to portray. But in those limited situations truth was the predominant characteristic…

“I am too much imbued with the spirit of Booker T. Washington,” he continued, “to engraft false virtues upon ourselves, to make ourselves that which we are not. Nothing could be a greater blow to our own progress.”

Considering the “burning criticism” his work had attracted more than once, Micheaux said that he was particularly grateful to black-owned theaters such as the Royal for loyally booking his and other race pictures.

“The colored producer has dared to step into a world which has hitherto remained closed to him. His entrance into this unexplored field is for him trebly difficult. He is limited, in his theme, in obtaining casts that present genuine ability, and in his financial resources. He requires encouragement and assistance. He is the newborn babe who must be fondled until he can stand on his own feet. If the race has any pride in presenting its own achievements in this field, it behooves it to interest itself, and morally encourage such efforts.

“I don't wish anyone to construe this as a request to suppress criticism. Honest, intelligent criticism is an aid to the progress of any effort. The producer who has confidence in his ideals solicits constructive criticism, but he also asks fairness, and fairness in criticism demands a familiarity with the aims of the producer, and a knowledge of the circumstances under which his efforts were materialized.”

Yet, for once, the “burning criticism” he anticipated did not materialize. The adaptation of Chesnutt's novel, which Micheaux had worked for four years to bring to the screen, pleased critics as much as any film he would ever produce.

The
Philadelphia Tribune
hailed
The House Behind the Cedars
as “a very faithful adaptation of the novel modernized in such a manner as not to destroy the story and at the same time making it a little more appealing. The photography was splendid, and the direction in the picture is proven by the smoothness and [is] well-placed and not exaggerated in any manner. It may be accorded by many critics as being the greatest work of this producer.”

“Even exacting picture fans,” agreed the
New York Amsterdam News,

“will find in this story something to keep them interested from the start, for the successful ‘passing' of a colored person for white holds an irresistible fascination.”

Ticket sales exceeded expectations. Indeed, at one point,
The House Behind the Cedars
was playing simultaneously at three of Harlem's largest theaters, racking up “turnaway” business, according to press accounts. Unfortunately, bookings outside New York were fumbled when the Micheaux film was held over in Harlem. The company “regretted the lack of more prints,” according to the
Baltimore Afro-American.

The noted artist and illustrator Elton Fax, who grew up frequenting the segregated theaters of Baltimore, remembered seeing
The House Behind the Cedars
as one of the moviegoing highlights of his youth. “I recall the thrill that I experienced,” said Fax, “because for the first time I saw our people on the screen in roles that were other than roles of the buffoon. The fact that the [Micheaux] pictures were rather crudely done didn't matter as much to me as the fact that they were done at all, and that they were done in his particular way.”

The censors took their usual nicks, or worse. Virginia condemned its fourth consecutive Micheaux picture (“aside from presenting the grievances of the negro in somewhat infelicitous subtitles,” the state board ruled,
The House Behind the Cedars
“touches even more dangerous ground—the intermarriage of the two races”). But Micheaux could shrug off a few Southern theaters, since he couldn't keep up with the demand elsewhere.

Nineteen twenty-four had been another precarious, uneven year for Micheaux, but not a terrible one.
Birthright
had done solid business and was still selling. And
The House Behind the Cedars
was a lifesaver—not just the lifesaver of 1924, but a permanent bulwark against disaster. This picture, “from the immortal novel by Charles W. Chesnutt,” was one that Micheaux could count on for repeat bookings, all the way through the rest of the decade.

As for the immortal novelist, Chesnutt wrote privately to his daughter, saying that he thought the film version was “very well done, but it was not my story.” Despite repeated appeals though, the author never got his last hundred-dollar payment from Micheaux. This flim-flam eventually soured the author's opinion. Writing in
The Crisis
in 1926, Chesnutt complained that a “propagandist” had “distorted and mangled” his book into a movie in order “to make it appeal to Negro race prejudice.”

Micheaux put on a show in person, too. He'd taken to speaking and dressing theatrically. Up North in the wintertime he'd wear a long Russian coat, and talk about his audience, his films, his “territories,” as though he were running an empire. “He'd come on like Czar Nicholas,” artist Elton Fax remembered. “The dusky czar of Race filmdom,” the
Chicago Defender
dubbed him.

Late in 1924, “looking the picture of health and prosperity,” Czar Oscar stopped by the offices of the
Chicago Defender,
trying to get some news out via Tony Langston's column. Though Langston was out of town, Micheaux regaled other reporters with his castles in the air, telling them he was “contemplating a trip to South America” and the West Indies in January. (A month or two later, he'd tell the press in another city that he was en route to Cairo and “several Russian cities” to arrange foreign bookings.) He foresaw a golden future for race pictures. “Our honored visitor was shown every courtesy at the command of the staff,” the
Defender
reported.

As with his earlier air castles, there is no evidence that these far-flung excursions ever materialized, though Micheaux did travel now and then to the West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica, was the last stop for showing his pictures). He was a “one-man corporation,” after all, and he knew it would be risky to leave the United States for any extended period. In fact, though his brother Swan had been running the Chicago office for several years, Micheaux had begun to suspect him of negligence or worse. And if not family, who could the race-picture pioneer trust?

But the empire was momentarily stable. The company had benefited from the success of
The House Behind the Cedars,
and Micheaux would maintain his blistering pace by producing three new motion pictures in 1925:
The Conjure Woman, The Devil's Disciple,
and
The Spider's Web.

 

Curiously, considering his dubious relationship with Charles W. Chesnutt, for his next film Micheaux would return to his first love among Chesnutt's works: the acclaimed short story collection,
The Conjure Woman.

His correspondence with Chesnutt had lapsed, but just as Micheaux had envisioned four years earlier, the springboard for his scenario would be “The Goophered Grapevine,” the first story in Chesnutt's collection. The story, which followed a Northern white couple who have moved to North Carolina and become proprietors of a vineyard that is “goophered” (that is, bewitched), launched a series of tall tales about the history of the property. The teller was an Uncle Remus–type freed slave named Uncle Julius. Recounted in black dialect, these tales of “slabery days” involved “conjure magic,” which was practiced by many blacks (and whites) in the South to ward off evil, mediate disputes, even regulate romances. In a sense, this “conjure magic” helped to redress the social imbalances of the time. “Above all,” as Chesnutt scholar Richard H. Brodhead has noted, “‘conjure' figures as a recourse, a form of power available to the powerless in morally intolerable situations.”

By now, the Roanoke branch of Micheaux's operation was in its death throes. Some of his local investors, such as C. Tiffany Tolliver, were estranged; others had long since had their coffers drained. Tensions over the censorship snafus had poisoned the bliss. How could Micheaux continue to make films in a state that refused to license them for exhibition?
The Conjure Woman,
with its Southern milieu, would be the last Micheaux production shot in the Roanoke vicinity, in the spring of 1925.

Pleased with the experience of
Birthright,
Evelyn Preer pledged to appear in all three of the films on Micheaux's 1925 roster. She and Percy Verwayen, a dynamic stage performer who went on to originate the role of Sportin' Life in the 1927 Broadway run of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward's
Porgy
(the basis of the Gershwins'
Porgy and Bess
), would portray the white couple. Lawrence Chenault was the story-spinning Uncle
Julius, and Micheaux recalled Mattie V. Wilkes, Chenault's mother in
The Symbol of the Unconquered,
to play the “Conjure Woman.”

Some Micheaux pictures are more “lost” than others, and despite the evidence of paid advertising and openings,
The Conjure Woman
received “comparatively few” confirmed showings and “a general dearth of publicity” upon its release in 1926, according to
Oscar Micheaux & His Circle.

There is no evidence that Chesnutt helped to write the scenario, as Micheaux originally had urged the author to do. Nor is there any evidence that Micheaux paid for the screen rights. Since he had fudged that responsibility in the case of
The House Behind the Cedars,
he may well have skirted the law with this second Chesnutt property, too. And it is just possible that Chesnutt or his publishers may have threatened suit to halt the distribution of
The Conjure Woman.

 

Micheaux was billing Preer as “The Screen's Most Beautiful Colored Star,” but her new husband was a match for the actress in talent and looks. In Nashville, while on the road with the Lafayette Players in 1924, Preer had married one of her onstage leads, Edward Thompson, the son of DeKoven Thompson, a well-regarded classical composer. The black press had given the marriage a lot of attention, and now Micheaux scurried to pair the newlyweds in two productions that would be shot back-to-back in the New York area.

The Devil's Disciple
would be Micheaux's first script centered on Harlem life, though its plot hewed closely to the ideas of his previous pictures. At its center was “a beautiful but vain girl who falls in love with a degenerate” tyrant, according to synopses in the black press. “She determines to reform him, but fails miserably, and is in turn dragged down and down.” The villain was an ogre of the underworld, a “disciple of Satan himself.” Besides Preer and Thompson, the cast included Percy Verwayen and Lawrence Chenault.

The Devil's Disciple
was rapidly organized for the summer, and then Preer and Thompson promptly segued into
The Spider's Web,
the first of several Micheaux productions to take on the issue of the “policy” or “numbers” racket, a form of gambling that victimized poor people, especially blacks. The “policy” game offered bets on numbers drawn by
lottery, or appearing in the financial pages, with the winnings rigged by organized crime.

The story of
The Spider's Web
began in the Delta before shifting to Harlem. Preer played a New Yorker who arrives in a small Southern town to visit her aunt (Henrietta Loveless). The aunt warns her about a white planter's son (Marshall Rodgers), who is notorious for seducing “any colored girl that comes to town.” A race sleuth (Lorenzo McLane) arrives in the town from Chicago, befriends Preer, and arrests the ne'er-do-well for “practicing peonage,” a uniquely Southern, post-slavery practice that forced borrowers to work off their debts.

Preer and her aunt light out for New York, where the aunt, desperate for money to pay for expensive surgery for her crippled daughter, becomes “hooked” on the policy racket. A Cuban “banker” (Edward Thompson) running the game is found mysteriously slain, and the aunt is arrested for theft and murder.

The race detective rushes to the rescue. Preer aids his investigation of the crime, which leads to a woman (Grace Smith) who eventually confesses to killing the “banker” because he was unfaithful to her.

The Conjure Woman, The Devil's Disciple,
and now
The Spider's Web
. For Micheaux, 1925 was the year of Preer. All his time—and all his available money—was expended on these three films starring his favorite actress. The inevitable shortfalls meant he had to stagger the editing and release schedules for each film.

The Spider's Web
—the only one of the three that he'd remake in the sound era—met with general approval when it was released two years later. “A great picture!” declared the
Baltimore Afro-American,
while the
Chicago Defender
called the anti–policy-racket film “as interesting a story of Negro life as one can wish to see.”

The Conjure Woman
went before audiences in 1926, but anything else one might say about it is speculative. Hollywood aficionados take for granted the thousands of film stills and lobby cards generated by the studio system, not to mention the fan clubs, magazines, and gossip columnists on the payroll to spark publicity. But in the case of Micheaux films, especially in the silent era, there is little beyond a few tantalizing mentions in the black press to illuminate some of his pictures. In the case of
The Conjure Woman,
not one still photograph has survived, and no researcher has unearthed a single review of the film.

The Devil's Disciple,
the most commercial of the three Preer vehicles,
was the first one Micheaux finished and the only one he was able to rush into theaters by late 1925. It was widely seen. The
New York Amsterdam News
found the latest Micheaux production “intensely gripping and dramatic,” and the
Pittsburgh Courier
agreed it was “an ecstasy of entertainment.” Preer herself considered the first film that she made with her husband to be among her “best work” for Micheaux, according to her daughter, scholar Sister Francesca Thompson.

Not a single print exists of any of the three Evelyn Preer vehicles made in 1925. Indeed, from the entire decade of the 1920s, during which time Micheaux wrote, directed, and produced at least eighteen feature films, only two survive:
The Symbol of the Unconquered,
and
Body and Soul
starring Paul Robeson.

 

Nearly a year had gone by since Micheaux had finished filming
Body and Soul,
and by late October 1925 he finally completed all the postproduction and booked the premiere for a New York theater. First, however, it had to be screened for the New York State Motion Picture Commission.

When the New York censors reviewed a nine-reel version on November 5, 1925, their jaws dropped at the film's portrait of a minister of the gospel who was also a gambler, extortionist, liar, thief, drunkard, and murderer.
Body and Soul
was “condemned en toto” as “sacrilegious, immoral, and would tend to incite to crime.”

In order to get
Body and Soul
into any theater in New York State, Micheaux was obliged to rework the Robeson picture drastically. Writing to the New York board from Roanoke—still, in late 1925, billed on his stationery as the site of the “Studio and General Offices” of the Micheaux Film Corporation—the director improvised a Plan B. In this solution, Robeson's evil twin would be not a real minister, but a phony. Perhaps he had neglected to make this “fully clear,” Micheaux ventured to the censors: the “central figure in this story,” the charismatic preacher played by Robeson, “is only masquerading as a minister, [and is actually] not an ordained minister,” he explained. “I therefore apologize….” Once the director had done a little reediting, it would be obvious: His story was a genuine moral parable.

Micheaux went to work, whittling down the film's most egregious material, and creating a new prologue that would identify the preacher as an
escaped convict with a knack for disguises (a singular fact that's promptly forgotten in the storyline). Micheaux didn't have time to manufacture a new screen card in Roanoke, but he sent the censors a scribbled version, advising them to stop the film after the opening credits and read his explanatory intertitle. The actual intertitle, he advised them, would take the form of a newspaper clipping: “‘Black Carl,' noted Negro detective, reports the escape of a prisoner…” In Roanoke, Micheaux shot quick footage of this eleventh-hour character, the shadowy “Black Carl” slipping among trees in a forest, presumably in pursuit of the fugitive Robeson.

Despite Micheaux's ingenious whittling, new prologue, and added footage, the New York censors rejected his appeal and affirmed their original ban. Forced into even more exigent measures, Micheaux began making radical cuts, reducing
Body and Soul
from nine reels to five, “changing the theme and transferring the villainy from the minister to another character [a no-good played by Lawrence Chenault],” in Micheaux's words, “and placing the preacher in no position anywhere, or having him do anything, that would be unbecoming the Clergy.” Micheaux even concocted an abrupt new ending that posited the entire story as a dream.

That did the trick. The New York censors approved the condensed, sanitized version of
Body and Soul
on November 12, although even then it was on the condition that Micheaux cut back further on the film's drinking and gambling scenes. But it had all been a short con of thimblerig for Micheaux. Regardless of the censors' decrees, he premiered the original version of
Body and Soul
at the New Douglas and Roosevelt theaters in Harlem in mid-November, before taking the Robeson film on the road to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Yet as often happened with Micheaux's most provocative films, what bothered the censors also upset some critics and audiences. Preachers in other cities denounced
Body and Soul
for its unflattering portrait of their calling. Once again, Micheaux was castigated for sprinkling his intertitles with the n-word. And on top of that, the film had boozing, gambling, borderline nudity, ugly violence—something to offend everyone. (A letter to the editor published in the
Chicago Defender
summed it up in one word: “filth”).

But it was also an undeniably gripping, unusually powerful movie. Micheaux's colorful character types were culled from real life. His frank depiction of religiosity and hypocritical church leaders resonated with
black America. And in most places where
Body and Soul
was shown, the black press showered it with superlatives.